It isn’t realistic to expect people to serve as business analysts (BAs) without sufficient training, guidance, and experience. The job involves many soft skills that are more people-oriented than technical. An effective BA combines strong communication, facilitation, and interpersonal abilities with technical and business domain knowledge, along with the right personality for the job. Patience and a desire to work with people are key success factors.
The fourteen skills described in this article are particularly important. Even if you don’t have the job title of business analyst, if you’re performing requirements development and related project work, these skills apply to you. As you read, do a little self-assessment to identify where you’re strongest and where you might benefit from enhancing your abilities. We can all benefit from skills growth.
Listening Skills
Proficient communication begins with learning how to listen effectively. I took a listening skills class long ago, although I’m not sure my wife would agree that I learned anything. Active listening involves eliminating distractions, maintaining an attentive posture and eye contact, and restating key points to confirm your understanding. You need to grasp what people are saying but also read between the lines to detect what they might hesitate to say.
Learn how your collaborators prefer to communicate so you can work with them effectively and comfortably. Avoid imposing your personal biases and preferences on what you hear from the customers. Watch out for unstated assumptions that underlie either what you hear from others or your own interpretation.
Communication Skills
The principal deliverable from requirements development is a set of written requirements that communicates information effectively among customers, marketing, managers, and technical staff. The analyst needs a solid command of the language and the ability to express complex ideas clearly both written and verbally. You must be able to write for multiple audiences, including customers who need to validate the requirements, developers who will implement them, and testers who will verify them in the product. A BA has to speak clearly, as well, and to present information at the level of detail each target audience needs.
Facilitation Skills
The ability to facilitate requirements discussions and elicitation workshops is a vital BA capability. Facilitation is the act of leading a group towards success. Facilitation is essential when collaboratively defining requirements, prioritizing needs, and resolving conflicts. A neutral facilitator who has strong questioning, observational, and leadership skills can help a group build trust. A skilled facilitator can improve the sometimes tense relationship between business and IT participants.
Interviewing and Questioning Skills
Most requirements input comes through discussions, so the BA must be able to interact with diverse individuals and groups about their needs. It can be intimidating to interact with senior managers and with highly opinionated or aggressive individuals. You need to ask the right questions to surface essential requirements information.
For instance, users naturally focus on the system’s normal, expected behaviors. However, much code gets written to handle exceptions. Therefore, you must also probe to identify error conditions and determine how the system should respond. With experience, you’ll become skilled in the art of asking questions that get below the surface to reveal and clarify uncertainties, disagreements, assumptions, and unstated expectations. Asking “Why?” can be particularly illuminating.
Observational Skills
An observant BA will detect comments made in passing that might be significant. By watching users perform their jobs or use a current application, a good observer can pick up details the user might not think to mention. Strong observational skills sometimes expose new areas for exploration, thereby revealing additional requirements.
Thinking on Your Feet
Business analysts need to be aware of the existing knowledge so they can process new information against it. They need to spot contradictions, uncertainty, vagueness, and assumptions so they can discuss them in the moment if appropriate. Even if you prepare a robust set of interview questions, you’ll always have to ask something that you didn’t foresee. Draft good questions, interpret the responses, and quickly come up with the next smart thing to say or ask.
Analytical Skills
An effective BA can think at both high and low levels of abstraction and knows when to move from one to another. Sometimes, you must drill down from high-level information into details. Other times, you’ll need to generalize from a specific need or scenario that one user described to a set of requirements that will satisfy multiple stakeholders. Analysts need to critically evaluate the input they hear to separate user “wants” from the underlying true needs, reconcile conflicts, and distinguish solution ideas from requirements.
Systems Thinking Skills
Although a good BA is detail-oriented, they must also see the big picture. The BA must check requirements against what they know about the whole enterprise, the business environment, and the application to look for inconsistencies and impacts. The BA needs to understand the interactions and relationships among the people, processes, and technology related to the system. If a customer requests new or changed functionality for their area, the BA needs to know whether that requirement affects other parts of the system, perhaps in unobvious ways.
Learning Skills
Analysts must learn new material quickly, whether it’s about new requirement approaches or the application domain. They should be efficient and critical readers because they have to wade through a lot of material and grasp the essence quickly. You don’t need to be a domain expert (although domain knowledge helps), so don’t hesitate to ask clarifying questions. Be honest about what you don’t know. It’s okay not to know it all, but it’s not okay to hide your ignorance.
Leadership Skills
A strong BA can steer a group of stakeholders to accomplish a common goal. Leadership requires understanding techniques to negotiate agreements among stakeholders, resolve conflicts, and make decisions. The analyst should create a collaborative environment, fostering trust among the various stakeholder groups who might not understand each other’s motivations, demands, and constraints.
Interpersonal Skills
Analysts must be able to get people with competing interests to work together. A BA should feel comfortable talking with individuals in diverse job functions and at all organizational levels. They should speak the language of the audience they are talking to, not using technical jargon with business stakeholders. They might need to work with virtual teams whose members are separated by geography, time zones, cultures, or native languages. A BA should be easy to communicate with and be clear and consistent when communicating with team members.
Organizational Skills
Business analysts confront a vast array of jumbled information gathered during elicitation. Coping with rapidly changing information and structuring all the bits into a coherent set demands exceptional organizational abilities. You need the patience and tenacity to make sense from ambiguity and disarray. As an analyst, you’ll need to set up an information architecture to support the project information as it grows throughout the project.
Modeling Skills
Modeling is a critical skill for business analysts. Models ranging from the venerable flowchart through structured analysis models, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, and the Requirements Management Language (RML) should be part of every BA’s repertoire. Some diagrams are useful when communicating with users, others when working with developers, and still others during requirements analysis. The BA will need to select appropriate models based on how they add value. Plan to educate other stakeholders on the value of using the models and how to read and critique them.
Creativity
The BA is not merely a scribe who records whatever customers say. The best analysts invent potential requirements for customers to consider. They conceive innovative product capabilities, imagine new markets and business opportunities, and think of ways to surprise and delight their customers.
A valuable BA finds creative ways to satisfy needs that users didn’t even know they had. Analysts can offer new ideas because they are not as close as users to the problem being solved. Be careful to avoid gold-plating the solution, though; don’t simply add new requirements without customer approval.
Where to Start?
Did you make some notes as you read this article about which skills you feel confident about and where you could improve? Select two of those weaker areas to enhance on your next project cycle, be it a single iteration, a release, or an entire product. And then pick out two more to work on for the next cycle. You’ll get there, pumping up your business analyst capabilities with each improvement round.
Author: Karl Wiegers
This article is adapted from Software Requirements, 3rd Ed. by Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty. Karl is the author of numerous other books, including Software Requirements Essentials (with Candase Hokanson), Software Development Pearls, The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things, and Successful Business Analysis Consulting.